A Multimodal Framework for Computer Mediated Learning: The Reshaping of Curriculum Knowledge and Learning

The dog is programmed to move from side to side, a restricted movement that again
signifies its weakness. The students use the most apt signifiers available to them (in
this case through image and animated movement) to realise the meaning they want to
express, that is the vulnerability of the character. As this example demonstrates the
distinction between code and resource has implications for the understanding the
agency of sign makers and the concept of sign.

To map the meaning potentials of language Halliday (1978) uses a style of
diagramming called 'system networks'. These system networks map the meaning
potentials of semiotic resources and the relations between them. System networks
have been used to explore the resources and the ‘grammar’ of visual communication
(Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996), sound (van Leeuwen, 1999), and action (Martinec,
2000). This work theorizes the networks of semiotic alternatives from a variety of
communicative modes that constitute the multimodal meaning potential of a culture,
that is, what can be meant.

The ideational metafunction of a semiotic system enables people to construct
representations of 'what goes on in the world': their experience of the world (external
and internal). The linguistic resources for doing this include words, which 'stand for'
the 'participants' (people, places, things in the world), and the system of transitivity,
which enables the creation of different relationships between these participants, in
terms of actor and goal, reactor. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) have extended the
ideational metafunction to analyse visual representation and communication.
Ideational meanings can also be realised through the semiotic potentials of the
resources of gesture (Jewitt and Kress, 2002a), gaze (Lancaster, 2001), movement
(Martinec, 2000), animated movement (Burn and Parker, in press), music (van
Leeuwen, 1999) and so on.

The interpersonal metafunction of semiotic systems constitutes and enacts relations
among the people involved in a communicative event, such as the role adopted by the

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